A large fraction of the most interesting scientists have read a lot of SF at one time or another, either early enough that it may have played a part in their becoming scientists or at some later date just because they liked the ideas.
Frederik Pohl
Advances have fallen, generally, for everything except the biggest potential bestsellers. Given all the changes, both economic and technological, SF hasn't done too badly.
Alan Dean Foster
Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's done, keep sending it out for quite awhile.
Rudy Rucker
An SF author who reads only SF will have little new to contribute, but someone with a broader experience will bring more to the table.
Walter Jon Williams
And in down times it shakes a lot of the bad SF out, a lot the stuff that was bought for literary reasons, which is neither entertaining nor great literature.
Jerry Pournelle
And, of course, some SF is set close enough to here and now that Anglo and European do apply. Since many of the writers come from those backgrounds, so does much of the fiction.
Stanley Schmidt
Anything can happen in SF. And the fact that nothing ever does happen in SF is only due to the poverty of our imaginations, we who write it or edit it or read it. But SF can in principle deal with anything.
John Sladek
Australian SF book publishing has undergone a boom recently, and sometimes it's easier for new writers to sell a book to a local publisher first, which then makes a US edition more likely.
Greg Egan
For every SF reader of that period, Robert A. Heinlein was also a touchstone.
Walter Jon Williams
I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I've never been able to sell. I'm known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre.
Lynn Abbey
I do not read SF as much as I used to. It's too much like a busman's holiday.
Jack L. Chalker
I feel SF is going through an experimental phase right now.
Sarah Zettel
I think the international appeal of SF is quite understandable since the kinds of people who like to read it, are, by the nature of the beast, interested in other cultures, of which other nations on Earth are the closest available example.
Stanley Schmidt
I think the rising and falling popularity of areas like hard SF and far-future SF is, to a considerable extent, the same as any other fashion.
Stanley Schmidt
I think these days an SF connection would be a boost to other books; I'm sure more people have read my two little detective puzzles because of the SF connection.
John Sladek
It's hard to generalize, because they're all different. When I started, I decided to take as much advantage as I could of the freedom offered by the SF field.
Walter Jon Williams
'Made it as a writer'? I'm still wondering if I've made it as a writer. I've made it as a published writer of the type of SF that I want to write and read, but I'm still waiting for that big breakthrough.
Eric Brown
Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.
Dan Simmons
Of course, the way writers think about those things is almost certain to be affected by their own cultural background, and it would be hard to deny that, for whatever reasons, a lot of SF writers come from Anglo or European backgrounds.
Stanley Schmidt
Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times.
Greg Egan
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